Substrate

Every strategy has two components to it that are super important. One of them is that you have to be able to see it. Not every feature of a release or a product is visible but everybody should be able to watch a visualization of the product and understand where their work will contribute to that visualization. Which brings us to the second point. The easiest way for people to understand it is to write something like a press release. That’s an interesting question and there is an easy answer, which is, that deadlines are what the team wants it to be. Now a big part about coming up with a deadline is that it is as much about the start as it is about the end date. Because the start date for work should also be the start date for which the end date has integrity. My first rule of meetings is to just not have them and then work backwards. And I don’t mean cliches like we have no meetings on Wednesdays, I mean don’t have meetings until you know what you’re going to accomplish. And the rhythm of the work is very different from the rhythm of the calendar. Things that you just say are weekly or daily or biweekly, they’re never connected to anything except the calendar. This is generally the path that people take: first they divide the product into a frontend and backend. Of course computer science people love that because you have an API, and you have a user interface that’s separate from the data, and it all sounds great—except in all systems for all of software history, the best, most innovative features come from breaking the abstraction layers between the frontend and the backend. The truth is once you have product-market fit, it’s unwise to listen too closely to your users. Because your users are so vested in incrementally improving the product that you’re going to incrementally improve your product to death.

Everyone else had invested years into optimizing for the most legible version of the rules. They’d look silly if they were to admit she had found a better way of doing things. The shameless strategy feels counterintuitive, because our first instinct is to want to punish that sort of behavior. And historically, those sanctions have been effective. Punishing outlandish behavior is an important aspect of cooperative governance: it preserves social order by ensuring that we all play by the same rules. One explanation might be that it’s an expected effect of the blurring of social boundaries today. In the past, if the size of your community was finitely bounded (like a village, or an aristocratic social class), people didn’t enter or exit these communities as frequently. Under these conditions, sanctions are probably still effective. But the borders to online communities are much more fluid - perhaps even nonexistent. Under open borders, sanctions will backfire, because they just serve as a signaling boost for the transgressor, attracting outsiders who resonate with that person’s message. What’s meant to be punishment instead becomes a flare shot straight into the night sky.